The semantic processing of syntactic structure in sentence comprehension: An ERP study

Brain Research

Volumn 1142, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 135-145

  Ye, Zheng ^a   Zhan, Weidong ^a   Zhou, Xiaolin ^a,b  

^a PEKING UNIVERSITY   (China)

^b BEIJING NORMAL UNIVERSITY   (China)

Author keywords

Constructionist approaches; ERP; N400; Semantics; Sentence comprehension; Syntactic structure

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ARTICLE; CHINA; COMPREHENSION; ELECTRODE; EVOKED RESPONSE; FEMALE; HUMAN; HUMAN EXPERIMENT; LANGUAGE ABILITY; LINGUISTICS; MALE; NORMAL HUMAN; PRIORITY JOURNAL; PROBABILITY; SEMANTICS; WORD RECOGNITION;

ADULT; ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE; BRAIN MAPPING; COMPREHENSION; ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY; EVOKED POTENTIALS; FEMALE; HUMANS; MALE; PHOTIC STIMULATION; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; SEMANTICS; TIME FACTORS;

EID: 33947119108     PISSN: 00068993     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2007.01.030     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Ahrens K. Verbal integration: the interaction of participant roles and sentential argument structure. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 22 (1995) 497-516
2. Bever T.G. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In: Hayes J.R. (Ed). Cognition and the Development of Language (1970), Wiley and Sons, New York 279-362
3. Bencini G.M.L., and Goldberg A.E. The contribution of argument structure constructions to sentence meaning. J. Mem. Lang. 43 (2000) 640-651
4. Brown C.M., Hagoort P., and Ter Keurs M. Electrophysiological signatures of visual lexical processing: open- and close-class words. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 11 (1999) 261-281
5. Chang F., Bock K., and Goldberg A.E. Do thematic roles leave traces in their places?. Cognition 90 (2003) 29-49
6. Chao Y. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968/1979), Univ. California Press, Berkeley [Chinese translation. 1979. Commercial Press, Beijing.]
7. Coulson S., King J.W., and Kutas M. Expect the unexpected: event-related brain responses to morphosyntactic violations. Lang. Cogn. Proc. 13 (1998) 21-58
8. Croft W. Radical Construction Grammar (2001), Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford
9. Cui X. Ba zi ju de ruogan jufa yuyi wenti [Some syntactic and semantic issues of the ba sentence]. Int. Chin. Lang. Teach. 3 (1995) 12-21
10. Culicover P.W. Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases in Syntax (1999), Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford
11. Delong K.A., Urbach T.P., and Kutas M. Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nat. Neurosci. 8 (2005) 1117-1121
12. Federmeier K.D., and Kutas M. A rose by any other name: long-term memory structure and sentence processing. J. Mem. Lang. 41 (1999) 469-495
13. Federmeier K.D., and Kutas M. Right words and left words: electrophysiological evidence for hemispheric differences in meaning processing. Cogn. Brain Res. 8 (1999) 373-392
14. Ferreira F., Bailey K.G.D., and Ferraro V. Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 11 (2002) 11-15
15. Fillmore C.J., Kay P., and O′Connor M.C. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: the case of let alone. Language 64 (1988) 501-538
16. Friederici A.D. Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends Cogn. Sci. 6 (2002) 78-84
17. Friederici A.D., and Frisch S. Verb argument structure processing: the role of verb-specific and argument-specific information. J. Mem. Lang. 43 (2000) 476-507
18. Friederici, A.D., Weissenborn, J., in press. Mapping sentence form onto meaning: the syntax-semantic interface. Brain Res.
19. Friederici A.D., Pfeifer E., and Hahne A. Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations. Cogn. Brain Res. 1 (1993) 183-192
20. Friederici A.D., Hahne A., and Mecklinger A. Temporal structure of syntactic parsing: early and late event-related brain potential effects elicited by syntactic anomalies. J. Exper. Psychol., Learn., Mem., Cogn. 22 (1996) 1-31
21. Frisch S., and Schlesewsky M. The N400 reflects problems of thematic hierarchizing. NeuroReport 12 (2001) 3391-3394
22. Gleitman L.R., Gleitman H., Miller C., and Ostrin R. Similar, and similar concept. Cognition 58 (1996) 321-376
23. Goldberg A.E. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (1995), Chicago Univ. Press, Chicago
24. Goldberg A.E. The relationships between verbs and constructions. In: Verspoor M., and Sweetser E. (Eds). Lexicon and Grammar (1997), John Benjamins, Amsterdam 383-398
25. Goldberg A.E. Construction: a new theoretical approach to language. Trends Cogn. Sci. 7 (2003) 219-224
26. Goldberg A.E. The Language of Constructions (2005), Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford
27. Goldberg A.E., and Jackendoff R. The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language 80 (2004) 532-568
28. Goodall G. On the argument structures and L-marking with Mandarin Chinese ba. In: McDonough J., and Plunker B. (Eds). Proceedings of North Eastern Linguistic Society Annual Meeting XVII (1987), University of Massachusetts, Amherst 232-242
29. Griffin Z.M., and Weinstein-Tull J. Conceptual structure modulates structural priming in the production of complex sentences. J. Mem. Lang. 49 (2003) 537-555
30. Gunter T.C., Stowe L.A., and Mulder G. When syntax meets semantics. Psychophysiology 34 (1997) 660-676
31. Gunter T.C., Friederici A.D., and Hahne A. Brain responses during sentence reading: visual input affects central processes. NeuroReport 10 (1999) 3175-3178
32. Gunter T.C., Friederici A.D., and Schriefers H. Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 12 (2000) 556-568
33. Hagoort P. Interplay between syntax and semantics during sentence comprehension: ERP effects of combing syntactic and semantic violations. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 15 (2003) 883-899
34. Hagoort P., Brown C.M., and Groothusen J. The syntactic positive shift (SPS) as an ERP measure of syntactic processing. Lang. Cogn. Proc. 8 (1993) 439-483
35. Hagoort P., Wassenaar M., and Brown C.M. Syntax-related ERP-effects in Dutch. Cogn. Brain Res. 16 (2003) 38-50
36. Hagoort P., Hald L., Bastiaansen M., and Petersson K.M. Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science 304 (2004) 438-441
37. Hahne A., and Friederici A.D. Electrophysiological evidence for two steps in syntactic analysis: early automatic and late controlled processes. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 11 (1999) 194-205
38. Hare M.L., and Goldberg A.E. Structural priming: purely syntactic?. In: Hahn M., and Stones S.C. (Eds). Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (1999), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London 208-211
39. Hashimoto A. Mandarin syntactic structure. Unicorn 8 (1971) 1-149
40. Hays W.L. Statistics for the Social Science. 2nd ed. (1973), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York
41. Hoeks J.C.J., Stowe L.A., and Doedens G. Seeing words in context: the interaction of lexical and sentence level information during reading. Cogn. Brain Res. 19 (2004) 59-73
42. Holcomb P.J., and Neville H.J. Nature speech processing: an analysis using event-related brain potentials. Psychobiology 19 (1991) 286-300
43. Holcomb P.J., Coffey S.A., and Neville H.J. Visual and auditory sentence processing: a developmental analysis using event-related potentials. Dev. Neuropsychol. 8 (1992) 203-241
44. Jackendoff R. Foundations of Language (2002), Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford
45. Kako E., and Wagner L. The semantics of syntactic structures. Trends Cogn. Sci. 5 (2001) 102-108
46. Kaschak M., and Glenberg A.M. Constructing meaning: the role of affordances and grammatical constructions in sentence comprehension. J. Mem. Lang. 43 (2000) 508-529
47. Kay P., and Fillmore C.J. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: the What's X doing Y? construction. Language 75 (1999) 1-34
48. Kim A., and Osterhout L. The independence of combinatory semantic processing: evidence from event-related potentials. J. Mem. Lang. 52 (2005) 205-225
49. Kotz S.A., and Friederici A.D. Electrophysiology of normal and pathological language processing. J. Neurolinguist. 16 (2003) 43-58
50. Kuperberg G.R., Sitnikova T., Caplan D., and Holcomb P.J. Electrophysiological distinctions in processing conceptual relationships within simple sentences. Cogn. Brain Res. 17 (2003) 117-129
51. Kuperberg G.R., Sitnikova T., Goff D., and Holcomb P.J. Making sense of sentences in schizophrenia: electrophysiological evidence for abnormal interactions between semantic and syntactic processing. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 115 (2006) 251-265
52. Kutas M., and Hillyard S.A. Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science 207 (1980) 203-205
53. Kutas M., and Federmeier K.D. Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends Cogn. Sci. 4 (2000) 463-470
54. Kutas M., and Van Petten C. Psycholinguistics electrified event-related brain potential investigations. In: Gernsbacher M.A. (Ed). Handbook of Psycholinguistics (1994), Academic Press, San Diego 83-143
55. Lamers M.J.A. Cracking the nutshell differently: commentary on Mueller. Lang. Learn. 56 Suppl. 1 (2006) 271-277
56. Lamers M.J., Jansma B.M., Hammer A., and Münte T.F. Neural correlates of semantic and syntactic processes in the comprehension of case marked pronouns: evidence from German and Dutch. BMC Neurosci. 7 (2006) Art. No. 23
57. Li Y. What does disposal mean? Features of the verb and noun in Chinese. J. Chin. Ling. 2 (1974) 200-218
58. Li T. Handedness questionnaire (Chinese version). Acta Psychol. 15 (1983) 268-276
59. Li A. Order and constituency in Mandarin Chinese (1990), Kluwer, Dordrecht
60. Lü S. Hanyu Yufa Lunwenji [Dissertations of Chinese Grammar] (1984), Commercial Press, Beijing
61. McKoon G., and Ratcliff R. Meaning through syntax: language comprehension and the reduced relative clause construction. Psychol. Rev. 110 (2003) 490-525
62. Münte T.F., Szentkuti A., Wieringa B.M., Matzke M., and Johannes S. Human brain potentials to reading syntactic errors in sentences of different complexity. Neurosci. Lett. 235 (1997) 105-108
63. Münte T.F., Heinze H.J., Matzke M., Wieringa B.M., and Johannes S. Brain potentials and syntactic violations revisited: no evidence for specificity of the syntactic positive shift. Neuropsychology 36 (1998) 217-226
64. Neville H.J., Nicol J., Barss A., Forster K.I., and Garrett M.F. Syntactically based sentence processing classes: evidence from event-related brain potentials. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 3 (1991) 151-165
65. Osterhout L., and Holcomb P.J. Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. J. Mem. Lang. 31 (1992) 785-806
66. Osterhout L., and Holcomb P.J. Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly: evidence of anomaly detection during the perception of continuous speech. Lang. Cogn. Proc. 8 (1993) 413-438
67. Roehm D., Schlesewsky M., Bornkessel I., Frisch S., and Haider H. Fractionating language comprehension via frequency characteristics of the human EEG. NeuroReport 15 (2004) 409-412
68. Schirmer A., Tang S., Penney T.B., Gunter T.C., and Chen H. Brain responses to segmentally and tonally induced semantic violations in Cantonese. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 17 (2005) 1-12
69. Tomasello M. Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition (2003), Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge
70. Townsend D.J., and Bever T.G. Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules (2001), MIT Press, Cambridge
71. Van Berkum J.J.A., Hagoort P., and Brown C.M. Semantic integration in sentences and discourse: evidence from the N400. J. Con. Neurosci. 11 (1999) 657-671
72. Van Herten M., Kolk H.H.J., and Chwilla D.J. An ERP study of P600 effects elicited by semantic anomalies. Cogn. Brain Res. 22 (2005) 241-255
73. Van Herten M., Chwilla D.J., and Kolk H.H.J. When heuristics clash with parsing routines: ERP evidence for conflict monitoring in sentence perception. J. Con. Neurosci. 18 (2006) 1181-1197
74. Wang L. Xiandai Hanyu Yufa [Modern Chinese Grammar] (1943), Commercial Press, Beijing
75. Wang P. A Transformation Approach to Chinese BA and BEI. Doctoral Dissertation (1970), University of Texas, Austin
76. Wicha N.Y.Y., Moreno E.M., and Kutas M. Anticipating words and their gender: an event-related brain potential study of semantic integration, gender expectancy, and gender agreement in Spanish sentence reading. J. Con. Neurosci. 16 (2004) 1272-1288
77. Ye Z., Luo Y., Friederici A.D., and Zhou X. Semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: evidence from event-related potentials. Brain Res. 1071 (2006) 186-196